Related papers: Designing and testing inflationary models with Bay…
In the presence of a short-distance cutoff, the choice of a vacuum state in an inflating, non-de Sitter universe is unavoidably ambiguous. The ambiguity is related to the time at which initial conditions for the mode functions are specified…
We are on the verge of the first precision testing of the inflationary cosmology as a model for the origin of structure in the Universe. I review the key predictions of inflation which can be used as observational tests, in the sense of…
We discuss the model selection problem for inflationary cosmology. We couple ModeCode, a publicly-available numerical solver for the primordial perturbation spectra, to the nested sampler MultiNest, in order to efficiently compute Bayesian…
We use cosmic microwave background and large scale structure data to test a broad and physically well-motivated class of inflationary models: those with flat tree-level potentials (typical in supersymmetry). The non-trivial features of the…
Bayesian model comparison penalizes models with more free parameters that are allowed to vary over a wide range, and thus offers the most robust method to decide whether some given data require new parameters. In this paper, we ask a simple…
A bidimensional parameter space of unitary area is introduced to study phenomenologically the dynamic and thermodynamic behavior of inflationary models driven by a scalar field coupled to a thermal component. In this enlarged context the…
We study the Brownian motion of a field where there are boundaries in the inflationary field space. Both the field and the boundary undergo Brownian motions with the amplitudes of the noises determined by the Hubble expansion rate of the…
We analyse models of inflation in which isocurvature perturbations present during inflation are converted into the primordial curvature perturbation during instant preheating. This can be due to an asymmetry between the fields present…
Inflation offers a simple model for very early evolution of our Universe and the origin of primordial perturbations on large scales. Over the last 25 years we have become familiar with the predictions of single-field models, but inflation…
Until recently our knowledge of the primordial curvature perturbation was relatively modest. Ever since COBE delivered its map of data we know the scalar spectrum of primordial perturbations is approximately flat, with the power being only…
We develop general criteria to construct unified frameworks for inflation and quintessence which employ a unique scalar field to drive both. By using such a minimal theoretical framework we avoid having to fine-tune couplings and…
Inflationary models usually assume the existence of scalar fields or other exotic gravitational sources. We investigate an alternative approach in which the entire Universe is considered as a thermodynamic system described by…
A plethora of inflationary models can produce interesting small-scale phenomenology, such as enhanced scalar fluctuations leading to primordial black hole (PBH) production and large scalar-induced GW. Nevertheless, good models must…
Dynamics of the inflaton is studied when it interacts with boson and fermion fields and in minimal supersymmetric models. This encompasses multifield inflation models, such as hybrid inflation, and typical reheating models. For much of the…
The pre-big bang scenario describes the evolution of the Universe from an initial state approaching the flat, cold, empty, string perturbative vacuum. The choice of such an initial state is suggested by the present state of our Universe if…
There exist several models of inflation that produce primordial bispectra that contain a large number of oscillations. In this paper we discuss these models, and aim at finding a method of detecting such bispectra in the data. We explain…
The early Universe inflation is well known as a promising theory to explain the origin of large scale structure of the Universe, a causal theory for the origin of primordial density fluctuations which may explain the observed density…
The presence of multiple fields during inflation might seed a detectable amount of non-Gaussianity in the curvature perturbations, which in turn becomes observable in present data sets like the cosmic microwave background (CMB) or the large…
We present and discuss a new approach increasing by orders of magnitude the speed of performing Bayesian inference and parameter estimation within the framework of slow-roll inflation. The method relies on the determination of an effective…
We show that there are inflationary models for which perturbations in the energy momentum tensor, which are of second order in the scalar field, cannot be neglected. We first specify the conditions under which the usual first order…